Project Definition
Bayer is a German multinational company specialised on pharmaceutical and life sciences. As one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, Bayer has a strong focus on research and development of the haemophilia treatment.
Haemophilia is a genetic disorder that affects the body’s blood-clotting ability, which can lead to excessive bleeding. This genetic defect is inherited recessively on the X chromosome, that means the majority of patients are men. The patients suffer from lack a protein that causes the blood to clot as part of the natural wound-healing process. In haemophilia A, which affects 80-85 per cent of patients with haemophilia, it is the blood clotting Factor VIII protein that is lacking. Severe haemophilia is portrayed by spontaneous bleeding into joints, muscles and various organs, even if there are no external injuries. This bleeding can lead to permanent disability or even death at any age.
Current treatments for Hemophilia-A based on giving the missing FVIII to patients prophylactically. The main target is to avoid the patient from spontaneous bleeding episodes. However, in this replacement treatment, stability and activity of the artificial FVIII in the blood reduced by the time and frequent infusions can affect a patient’s quality of life. Jivi is designed to overcome this obstacle by the addition of PEG, or PEGylation, a substance that, once connected to FVIII, improves its stability and significantly lengthens its half-life in the blood compared with other currently available therapies.
Bayer requested an Ipad based application to help sale representatives about effectiveness and potentials of Jivi on haemophilia treatment processes.
The Challenge
The tablet is allowing sales representatives to travel lighter, present data and demos in a more engaging, attractive way, and eliminate the amount of sales reports they are writing out. Creating a properly interactive, appealing content and sharing with sales teams, creating differentiation according to local markets, collecting feedback from the field, tracking activities is financially burdensome and very time-consuming. Also uploading and updating files is another administrative and technical issue for distributed organisations.
My Role
I was the leading user experience designer on this project. We started from scratch by researching, strategising, conceptualising product content framework, creating an information architecture based on the nature of sale activities, designing and delivering the hand-offs to the developers. My role is understanding the profile of sale representatives, their processes, creating a consistent user journey based on their performance criteria and simplifying the navigation while being a contributor to the design process as a facilitator. I created a site map, and user flows, wireframes, online interactive prototype, wrote functional specifications for design and user behaviour.
The Approach
I worked with sale representatives, account managers, medical copywriters, SMEs and project manager. We researched to understand sale representatives’ previous pitching experiences, struggles experienced with HCPs, possible improvement potentials in their sale activities and potential data collection opportunities while making sale pitch.
Problems and Solutions
Pharmaceutical sale representatives provide a vital link between pharma companies and HCP to communicate the potentials and capabilities of new products. Pharma representatives are persistent, confident selling professionals who visit HSPs to promote new products tested by their company.
Sales representatives have the primary task of informing HCPs about the medical benefits of dosing patients with their company’s product. They frequently meet with HCPs to describe the drug’s efficacy, dosing, treatment, side effects, and potential interactions. Pharma companies hire representatives to follow leads and target potential new customers within an assigned geographic region. We created content for pharmaceutical sales representatives specialized in Hemophilia A.
We created content according to two patient types named Scott and Tom. Their clinical characteristics represent the majority of Hemophilia A patients. In the first part, we created statistical data that represent the power of protection. We use the reduction of infusion as a unique selling point as a second part. In the end, powering long-term protection for patients is another benefit we gain from Jivi. Finally, bleeds that occur in joints and muscle treatment happens with 90% effectiveness with two or fewer infusions.
All these statistical and technical information derived from pharmaceutical researches are converted into a series of interactive, easily digestible content while visually appealing. This task was especially challenging for a new product to release into a highly regulated sector. Not only because materials need to be clear and easy to understand, but also engaging in promoting a product and information about the treatment process. We tried to create a minimalistic visual language and simple interactions for structuring the data and reduce the cognitive load.